Elie Wiesel: Writing for Peace
by Sophia Wang
 "Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s
gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other." Placed in the National Archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is an infamous photo of the Nazi concentration Buchenwald. The men are stacked into rows of bunk beds. On the right, one of them is standing, his skin stretched tightly over his bones, his face so grieved it is beyond emotional expression. From the dark shadows behind a beam peers the dark eyes of a prisoner, on the verge of manhood. Like all the others, he is frail, on the brink of hope and despair. That boy was Elie Wiesel, and he not only survived these horrors but endured to tell his own story and of those who died. While many figures in their heroic quest for peace have inspired followers to shape the world’s future through their leadership and idealism, Elie Wiesel has turned to a different instrument to teach humankind about the importance of peace: writing. His trilogy, Night, Twilight, and Dawn, encapsulated the horrors of the Holocaust experience, and has grown in relevance with the current cultural conflicts, the genocide in the Balkans and the suicide bombings and territorial conflicts in the Middle East. Wiesel’s path to this unusual destiny began in Sighet, a small mountain town steeped in the Hasidic traditions, where he was born on the Jewish holiday Simchat Torah (September 30) in 1928. As a child, he spent many hours alone, memorizing the Torah and preparing to become a rabbi. Then the Holocaust struck. Wiesel lost his mother and his younger sister at Auschwitz and then his father at Buchenwald. Afterwards, he went to an orphanage at Ambloy, France, and eventually continued his studies in literature, philosophy and psychiatry at the Sourbonne in Paris. He then became a Paris correspondent for the Yediot Ahronoth, based in Tel Aviv. During this experience, he traveled around the world and faced poverty and starvation, but made an important contact when he interviewed the Nobel laureate François Mauriac, who persuaded him to discuss his Holocaust experiences and later helped him publish his first novel Night in the West. Fate played another unexpected hand when Wiesel was covering the United Nations in New York and was seriously injured in a car accident. Temporarily confined to a wheelchair and unable to return home, he became a U.S. citizen to continue to legally stay in the States. It was here he met and married Marion Rose, who has translated many of his works written in French into English. "And now let me tell you a story." Wiesel decided to dedicate his life to recording his past, not as a historian, but as a writer. Unlike his Russian counterpart, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Wiesel’s sufferings did not drive him to lengthy outpourings in the Tolstoyan tradition. Instead his mission for peace was expressed in the opposite sense and even more powerful and unexpected form: silence. He wanted his readers to face the unspeakable, the indescribable—the void created by the death of the Holocaust’s victims. Words were not to be trusted. "We write against words." (Cargas, 93) He was too well-aware of their power to distort and betray, just as the Nazis had used propaganda to turn its citizens against Jews and other minorities. He never attempted to write about what cold not be written, to touch that intangible domain of fear, death and hatred. Rather than lecturing his readers about the evils of nazi Germany or delving into lengthy abstract discussions about human cruelty or moral injustice, Wiesel sought to directly connect with the human heart through stories: parables from the Biblical tradition, tales from his own heritage, memories of his Holocaust experience and afterwards. He hoped his readers would not analyze the human condition as a detached or philosophical bystander, but would become part of the moment, sensing the same feelings the Holocaust victims did, lest this new generation lapse into the same indifference that had killed the Jews. His first novel, La Nuit or Night, was a moving autobiographical account of his Holocaust experience. A fifteen year old boy was shipped off to the concentration camps where he watched his mother and sister die and then his father murdered. Perhaps one of the most unforgettable passages is his story of the "skeletons of men, fighting one another to the death for a mouthful [of bread]."
"The frightening aspect of the Holocaust is that even the killers are human ... to them a Jew ... was not a human being. What shield do we possess to protect us from becoming inhuman?" (Cargas, 38) Not surprisingly, Wiesel’s work has earned him recognition in the academic field. He was made a visiting scholar at Yale University and an Andrew Carnegie Mellon Professor at Boston University. Wiesel has not restricted his activities to writing but also plunged into social activism. His influence has been extended far beyond the circles of Holocaust literature and Jews. He has spoken not only on the behalf of Israel and Jews but also other minorities who were suppressed and persecuted or suffering from inhumanity, Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, Argentina’s Desaparecidos, Cambodian refugees, the Kurds, victims of famine in Africa, victims of apartheid in South Africa, and victims of war in the former Yugoslavia. His social activism led to various important appointments and awards, including the chair of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust and the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1968 and afterwards set up the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Its mission was to honor the Holocaust’s victims and survivors by providing a platform to discuss human rights and intolerance. Wiesel also served as the first chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council from 1980-1986 and continues to be on this prestigious committee, which has in its charge the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. It is here on the third floor tower room of the permanent exhibit, bracketed by fence posts from Auschwitz, a light shines from the darkness upon the wall which in part, reads:
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